Acquiring the parts for the Duckiebot C0

Power Supply

We want a hard-wired power source (5VDC, 2.4A, Micro USB) to supply the RPI-3 (Figure 4).

The price for this in the US is about USD 5-10.

Heat Sinks

The RPI-3 will heat up significantly during use. It is warmly recommended to add heat sinks, as in Figure 5. Since we will be stacking HATs on top of the RPI-3 with 15 mm standoffs, the maximum height of the heat sinks should be well below 15 mm. The chip dimensions are 15x15 mm and 10x10 mm.

Class 10 MicroSD Card

The MicroSD card (Figure 6) is the hard disk of the RPI-3. 16 Gigabytes of capacity are sufficient for the system image.

Mirco SD card reader

A MicroSD card reader (Figure 7) is useful to copy the system image to a Duckiebot from a computer to the RPI-3 microSD card, when the computer does not have a native SD card slot.

Tiny 32GB USB Flash Drive

This “external” hard drive (Figure 8) is very convenient to store logs during experiments and later port them to a workstation for analysis. It provides storage capacity and faster data transfer than the MicroSD card.

Camera Mount

The camera mount (Figure 10) serves to keep the camera looking forward at the right angle to the road (looking slightly down). The front cover is not essential.

300mm Camera Cable

A longer (300 mm) camera cable Figure 11 make assembling the Duckiebot easier, allowing for more freedom in the relative positioning of camera and computational stack.

Stacking Headers

We use long 20x2 stacking headers (Figure 15) to connect the RPI-3 with the other HATs, creating a stack. This item will require soldering to be functional.

In configuration D17-1, we need 2 stacking headers.

In all configurations, we use only 1 stacking header.

LED HAT

In configuration D17-1, the LED HAT (Figure 20) provides an interface for our RGB LEDs and the computational stack. This board is a daughterboard for the Adafruit 16-Channel PWM/Servo HAT, and enables connection with additional gadgets such as ADS1015 12 Bit 4 Channel ADC, Monochrome 128x32 I2C OLED graphic display, and Adafruit 9-DOF IMU Breakout - L3GD20H+LSM303. This item will require soldering to be functional.

This board is custom degined and can only be ordered in minimum runs of 3 pieces. The price scales down quickly with quantity, and lead times may be significant, so it is better to buy these boards in bulk.

PWM/Servo HAT

In configuration D17-1, the PWM/Servo HAT HAT (Figure 21) mates to the LED HAT and provides the signals to control the LEDs, without taking computational resources away from the Rasperry Pi itself. This item will require soldering to be functional.

Male-Male Jumper Wires

In configuration D17-1, the Duckiebot requires one male-male jumper wire (Figure 22) to power the DC Stepper Motor HAT from the PWM/Servo HAT.

Female-Female Jumper Wires

In configuration D17-1, 20 Female-Female Jumper Wires (Figure 23) are necessary to connect 5 LEDs to the LED HAT.